Question

After working some time without problems, recently something seems to have been changed on the server.
When saving an edited page, the RCS repository file is not updated any more.
The system gives error messages like the following:

I have read virtually all articles on RCS problems, have checked the access rights und ownership carefully and tried to get rid of the problem by using non-strict locking - however, the problem does not disappear.

I have checked the {DataDir}. It is set to the correct absolute path. Everything seems to work well, including authentication. The only thing that does not work is the save function which produces the above mentioned error message.

Try turning on tracing in the lib/TWiki/Sandbox module. The output goes to the apache error log. Then paste the command used to do the rlog onto the command line on the server, and see what it says - you may get a more intelligible error message.

I reopened the question, as the same problem occured on my installation, using the same configuration (Suse Linux, Apache 2.0.54, Perl 5.8.7). The problem rarely also occured when using WebChanges.The installation was running without any problems for several weeks. I didn't make any severe changes or install any new plugins during that time.

The only workaround I found so far is to restart the webserver for example using apache2ctl restart. It therefore might be a caching problem, which has something to do with mod_perl. Unfortunately, I didn't find any further information at warn.txt or the apache-error.log.

The only effect, which I can imagine for now is the introduction of automatic webstatiscs-updates by a cronjob as root-user (didn't work as wwwrun), leading to a RCS-Version file, which belongs to root:

-r--r--r-- 1 root root 12660 2007-10-07 03:00 WebStatistics.txt,v

I therefore will stop the cronjob and chown the WebStatistics.txt,v to wwwrun:www and hope, that the problem doesn't reappear... Any other ideas?

After one Week without any problems, it's back again, apache2ctl restart helps, I might set it as cronjob. One interesting aspect: the server also runs a qmail server, which seemed to be blocked during the last days, after running apache2ctl restart it's unblocked again. There might be a very nasty side effect... any ideas to that?